The banking and payments industry is going through a period that is equally rich in both challenges and opportunities. Even as geopolitical instability, inflation and fluctuating interest rates unsettle the market, banks have a plethora of new ways to unlock profitable growth. It’s evident that the ability to adapt to changing regulation and the ability to deliver tailored customer experiences, served efficiently, and at scale is the route to which this growth will be unlocked.

MoneyLIVE Summit made it clear that our industry is tackling this challenge head-on, highlighting the innovation and transformation happening all across banking and payments. Speakers shared stories about innovation across the value chain, and from within every department. A key focus was on unlocking the value within data, including leveraging AI and new technologies to truly derive large-scale commercial benefits.

Although Large Language Models and Generative AI look to be confined to research teams over the coming years, banks are looking hard at developing and operationalising other forms of AI at scale across the enterprise. Whilst up to 90% of advanced analytic insight never sees the light of day operationally, the barriers that have held these organisations back are now being lifted.

From a governance perspective, discussions around operating AI with accountability, fairness, transparency, and responsibility are now firmly making their way into the boardroom. New technologies are facilitating these discussions, by providing the evidence around the responsible and interpretable uses of models.

When it comes to delivering AI and business transformation at scale, a key challenge still remains – complex banking architectures that are made up of monolithic applications. Whilst 7% of financial services organisations have pioneered the application of composable architectures to address this, 60% report that they will take this approach in 2024. This ability to abstract the intelligence and become more adaptable by leveraging modular, intelligently orchestrated and reusable capabilities will enable banks to evoke change with more agility, more consistency and more intelligently, and will ultimately lead to keeping up with market demands and delivering those ever so important hyper-personalised experiences that drive customer satisfaction and revenue growth.

Those insights a bank wishes to pursue will depend on where it perceives most value: hyper-personalisation of offers and communications to grow market share and boost customer loyalty, consolidation of fractured customer wallets or generating new propositions that add value throughout the customer life cycle. The possibilities are myriad.

We see 2024 as the year that banks must achieve this kind of customer focus and agility if they aren’t to fall behind the transformation curve and lose out to more flexible and data-driven competitors.